Tom McArthur reflects on the long and fruitful life of Frederic Gomes Cassidy, who died on 14 June 2000, aged 93.

A reply to Tom McArthur, ‘Error, Editing, and World Standard English’, ET65 (Jan 01)

When modern linguists focus exclusively on speech, they're overreacting to their predecessors' preoccupation with writing. Descriptivists have a bias toward studying speech; prescriptivists have a bias toward studying writing. Both are important. Speaking precedes writing. It's the essence of language. Yet writing is a form of language worth studying in its own right. For some reason, though, many linguists refuse to recognize this.

A personal account of ‘additive multilingualism’ that involves Polish, Russian, English, French and Chinese.

This article reports on work on English in Scandinavian countries that is currently available in Danish, and in particular presents and analyses a recent book. This contains six papers given at a conference in Copenhagen in March 1998 on the influence of English on Danish, along with a newspaper article that had raised several of the language policy issues somewhat earlier. The book also contains the text of a policy document written for the Swedish government by the Swedish Language Council, ‘Proposal for a plan of action to promote the Swedish language’.

A report on independent ELT undertakings in the world's most populous country. The teaching of English as a foreign language in China has expanded rapidly in the last two decades. In colleges all over China, from key universities to small provincial institutions, non-English majors have to study English for at least two years and they have to pass the College English Test (CET) Band 4 before they can get their graduation certificates. In the year 2000, over 3.5 million candidates sat for the CET in the summer.

A report on, and a glossary of, imaginative usage in the world of drug-taking.

CrossworLd by Frank Palmer, Lexicon 1: ‘What's that bird?’ by Paul Rastall, Usage: ‘IN versus ON revisited’, by Tim Connell, Lexicon 3: ‘OED update’, ‘Hardy Perennial’, poem by Roger Berry

A survey of hybridization in proper names and commercial signs. CODE-SWITCHING is commonly seen as more typical of the spoken language. But there are some areas of language use, including business names (e.g. restaurants), where foreign proper names, common nouns and sometimes whole phrases are imported into the written language too. These constitute a more stable variety of code-switching than the spontaneous and more unpredictable code-switching in the spoken language.

Review: Encyclopedia of the Languages of Europe, Languages in Britain and Ireland